An alarm indication signal (AIS) is typically used to indicate a signal failure. The use of the AIS is widely popular and used in many transport platforms and standards, and also used in various applications. For example, the AIS may suppress alarms that are on nodes that are not the root cause of a failure. Further, the AIS may trigger protection switching, for instance, by switching a node to a protected service virtual local area network (SVLAN). In another example, the AIS may raise a non-critical and non-reportable alarm (e.g., not reported to a user autonomously) to a network management system.